In a sensational honour killing incident in Patna, an educated middle-aged Muslim woman has unrepentantly confessed to have killed her own teenage daughter, a biotechnology student, for marrying a “substandard youth” against the family’s plans to find an engineer as her groom.
Shamima Khatoon, a housewife with a graduate degree, killed her daughter Nazreen Bano in cold blood by repeatedly hitting her head with an iron rod and then strangulating her at their house in the Bihar capital’s Khagaul area in the wee hours of April 19, she told police and journalists.
“I first offered namaaz and then read the Quran. Then I first hit her head with an iron rod as she lay asleep in bed. When she woke up and began arguing, I hit her head again and again, and then strangulated her. She had tarnished the name of our family,” said the mother of five children, who gives tuition to girls up to Class 12, after her arrest on Sunday. “I am not sad for having killed my own daughter with my own hands,” she added.
Nazreen Bano alias Rani, 19, had married Mohammad Mahfouz alias Raja, at a local court on April 16 and complained at the Patna chief judicial magistrate’s court the next day saying her life was under threat from her family.
In fact, she had returned home on April 18 when her mother told her that her family would accept her marriage with Mahfouz, whose mother works as a domestic help in the neighbourhood. “He (Mahfouz) is a substandard youth. I have seen his mother cleaning utensils at people’s homes. I had decided to kill her (Nazreen) when she defied our best wishes for her,” said Shamima, wife of railway cabin man Abdul Hakim.